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Wilmot’s Warehouse - from CMYK, the publisher of recent classics such as Daybreak, Lacuna, Wavelength and Spots - is structured like many cooperative games. The group must manage a daunting challenge together, victory uncertain and good communication necessary. Players join their brains to remember the locations of 35 geometrically illustrated tiles on a seven by seven grid, revealed one by one but placed face down. To help with the journey players are encouraged (mandated) to communally tell a story of what each tile is and how they relate to each other. Once all have been rolled out, the hidden tiles must be matched with corresponding cards. Every 7 tiles, a rules card is drawn to mix things up - perhaps every tile must relate to the sea, or every word spoken must begin with a letter in Wilmot.
What’s different about Wilmot’s Warehouse (aside from the fact that, like many have noted, it is an actually good memory game) is that the joy comes from how easy it is, not its challenge. During set up it seems unimaginable that 35 abstract doodles might become etched, spatially and visually, into our memories. Yet magically it happens. The route there could be ridiculous and surreal, or rigorously logical and ordered, but the outcome is generally the same - at the end the grid comes together with a vividness few but the most photographic memories would expect. It is a game insistent on proving your mnemonic obsessed GCSE teachers right on the power of memory techniques.
Knowing this, the game tries to to provide extra friction. There is strictly speaking a time limit on end of the game guessing, with players encouraged to record and minimise their times. The rules cards add challenge and friction, directing the story in unexpected ways, distracting players with irrelevant conversations or severely restricting communication. But though these are welcome frictions for challenge hungry players, the game is at its best when its main joys are front and centre - communal story telling with apparently mind-augmenting properties. The best games have rules cards that engage unexpectedly with the storytelling rather than reigning it in - the surprise of having to link your farm-themed factory layout to space is more joyous than being left to three words of discussion per player.
There are a bunch of tools to keep the game repayable - though the pleasure of the first game is hard to beat. As well as the rules cards there is a huge variety of tiles, with only around a third coming out each game. Most importantly, the grid system, and requirement to place a tile next to an existing one means that the order the tiles come out is hugely important to the story told - what a tile ends up meaning depends hugely on what has come exactly before, and what comes exactly next. It’s wonderful to see a familiar tile from games past come out meaning something entirely different in its next life.
Players will have most fun pushing this system to its limits, telling the whackiest stories they can with the abstract blobs. Again and again I thought my clue might be too weird, too specific to work with what comes next. But because what memory needs is weirdness, it’s hard to push it so far it doesn’t work any more. Ultimately, this is game that shares more DNA with roleplaying games than memory puzzles, because it wants to tell you how powerful stories are, not just how powerful memory is. Victory is secondary, the journey can be wonderful.
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